Speaking of Books with Jordana Moore Saggese: Heavyweight: Black Boxers and the Fight for Representation

In Heavyweight, Jordana Moore Saggese examines images of Black heavyweight boxers to map the visual terrain of racist ideology in the United States, paying particular attention to the intersecting discourses of Blackness, masculinity, and sport. Looking closely at the “shadow archive” of portrayals across fine art, vernacular imagery, and public media at the turn of the twentieth century, shedemonstrates how the images of boxers reveal the racist stereotypes implicit in them, many of which continue to structure ideas of Black men today. With a focus on both anonymous fighters and notorious champions, including Jack Johnson, Saggese contends that popular images of these men provided white spectators a way to render themselves experts on Blackness and Black masculinity. These images became the blueprint for white conceptions of the Black male body—existing between fear and fantasy, simultaneously an object of desire and an instrument of violence. Reframing boxing as yet another way whiteness establishes the violent mythology of its supremacy, Saggese highlights the role of imagery in normalizing a culture of anti-Blackness.

Jordana Moore Saggese is a Professor in the Department of Art History and Archaeology at the University of Maryland, College Park, and Director of The David C. Driskell Center. Previously, she served as Editor-in-Chief of Art Journal. An internationally recognized expert on Jean-Michel Basquiat, she authored Reading Basquiat: Exploring Ambivalence in American Art (2014), which received the PEN Center Award for Exceptional First Book, and The Jean-Michel Basquiat Reader (2021). Her latest book, Heavyweight: Black Boxers and the Fight for Representation (2024), examines representations of Black athletes in visual culture. Her essays have appeared in Art Journal, Nka: Journal of Contemporary African Art, Panorama, Flash Art, b.O.s. (Black One Shot), International Review of African American Art, Oxford Art Online, TED-Ed, and Artforum. A recipient of the Alisa Mellon Bruce Senior Visiting Fellowship at the Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts, her scholarship has also shaped major museum exhibitions at the Fondation Louis Vuitton, Baltimore Museum of Art, Montreal Museum of Fine Arts, Barbican Centre, and Princeton University Art Museum.